Denominations, Degeneration, Decadence

By Sumit Paul, New Age Islam

24 June 2023

Jahan Se Bana Mulk, Mulk Se Sooba

Soobe Se Qasba Bana, Qasbe Se Mohalla

Dee Thi Tu Ne Toh Mukammal Kainaat

Insaan Ne Iss Ka Kya Bana Dala, Allah

Yaas Yagana Changezi

(The world had shrunk to a country, country had become a province/ Province degenerated into a town and town narrowed down to a colony/ You gave us the whole universe/ Look, what we've made out of it)

Chhoti-Chhoti Toliyon Mein Bant Gaya Insaan

Ek Naye Firqe Ki Har Roz Khulti Hai Dukaan

Mehraab Faizabadi

(Man is divided into small groups/ Every other day, a new sect comes into being)

Na Tera Khoon Hara Hai Na Mera Neela

Sab Ka Jab Ek Sa, Toh Kis Baat Ka Jhamela

Asad Bhopali

(Neither is your blood green, nor is mine blue / When everyone has the same red blood, why is this hullabaloo? )

Plutarch tells the story of Alexander the Great, who came upon Diogenes looking attentively at a heap of human bones. "what're you looking for?" asked Alexander. " Something that I cannot find," said the philosopher. "And what's that?"  "The difference between your father's bones and those of his slaves."

The following are just as indistinguishable: Catholic bones from Protestant bones. Hindu from Muslim bones, Arab bones from Israeli bones, Russian bones from American bones.

The enlightened fail to see the difference, even when the bones are clothed in flesh!!

Yet, when we're alive, we keep wrangling over sects and denominations; your god, my god; your faith, my faith; your scripture, my scripture. This goes on. Never for a moment do we think that all these differences and distinctions are created by us. God, if at all it does exist, will surely not sort out prayers by denominations. But, why do we create differences? There's a theory in anthropology, called " Group Vulnerability." According to this theory, "Human beings love to live in a group, but they cannot live very comfortably if the group is very big. They, therefore, choose a smaller group, comprising people with more or less the same interests and tastes. Birds of the same feather flock together. After forming the homogeneous group, they begin to treat other such homogeneous groups as distinctly different from theirs. Thus begins the rivalry and this is all pervasive, influencing all the actions and activities. Cult-formation is an offshoot of this phenomenon.

At the same time, all these denominations also indicate that the general human beings don't feel pigeon-holed and shoe-horned into these sects and subsects. Rather, we like to be categorised into small boxes. Aldous Huxley wrote in "The Brave New World" that, " It's not enough for the masses to follow a specific religion, but also be a part of one of its denominations." If religion gives one a sense of belonging, denominational allegiance further consolidates it.

But the question is: Can the religious denominations be abolished or abnegated? No. Religion is a perceived truth and even truth is not objective. It's subjective. Our different theological interpretations engender different cults and our insistence on a particular cult helps generate these denominations. That's the reason, there are denominations like: Doomsday cult and Saffronites et al.

We human beings cannot live without a group and every group is a throwback to our collective primitivism, now manifested in our religions. To quote Sartre, " We're eternally doomed to remain humans." We don't strive to evolve because the very thought of evolution is an anathema to riff-raff and the blissfully unevolved.  

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A regular columnist for New Age Islam, Sumit Paul is a researcher in comparative religions, with special reference to Islam. He has contributed articles to the world's premier publications in several languages including Persian.

 

URL:   https://newageislam.com/spiritual-meditations/denominations-degeneration-decadence/d/130063

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